In June, seven provinces and territories published a joint, multi-pronged strategy with one overarching goal: to establish Western and Northern Canada as a globally competitive supplier of critical minerals.
For mining experts, the strategy is notable for several reasons. It marks the first time multiple jurisdictions have coordinated to expand Canada’s capacity to extract and process critical minerals, which are essential to products such as smartphones, laptops, electric vehicle batteries, and solar panels. It’s an initiative that recognizes – and seeks to leverage – Canada’s wealth of critical mineral resources, processing capabilities, and mining talent. And it aligns squarely with the broader national goal of reducing Canada’s dependence on non-domestic resources.
Explaining the importance of developing Canada’s critical minerals industry, Roy Millen, a partner at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP who specializes in advising clients on Aboriginal law in mining and energy projects, notes that there’s “economic need for critical minerals for enhanced computing power, AI, and other developments along those lines.”
Millen adds that countries are no longer trading as freely as they once were. “That means that you can’t necessarily access critical minerals from other countries just because they are in other countries,” he says.
Greg McNab, a partner at Dentons who co-chairs the firm’s mining group, says the joint critical minerals strategy is “a sign that we’re ready to get on with things and… build out our economy.”
“One of the things that we haven’t traditionally been great at in Canada is coordinating massive efforts like this,” McNab says. “The fact that we’ve now got our act together… is a good sign for Canada generally.”
Titled “Stronger Together: A Critical Minerals Strategy for Western and Northern Canada,” the strategy, which came out on June 25, was jointly released by British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. The strategy identifies three pillars that collectively focus on goals such as creating regulatory certainty, attracting investment, and building the infrastructure needed to execute ambitious critical-minerals projects.
The strategy came months after the seven provinces and territories signed a memorandum of understanding committing to developing a critical minerals strategy.
For Robin Longe, a partner at Dentons and co-leader of the firm’s Canadian mining practice, one of the biggest takeaways from the strategy is its commitment to creating a more “coordinated, predictable, and efficient” permitting process for mining projects. According to the strategy, this will entail the participating provinces and territories coordinating their permitting approaches and sharing best practices.
Miners have long complained that “the permitting process is too slow in Canada,” Longe says. “It needs to be more streamlined, and often if you have a project that involves [multiple] jurisdictions, that slows things down.”
The average length of the permitting process for a mining project can be as long as 15 years, McNab says. One of the reasons the permitting process has historically taken so long is that federal, provincial, and municipal permit approvals – which could all be required for a single project – were often processed sequentially rather than in parallel. “You had to go and apply for one, and then when you got that one, you could then go and knock on the door of the next department, and then you could file all that same material again and ask for the next set of permits,” McNab says.
“One of the goals… is to at least merge the federal and provincial permitting or approval process, so you would go to one agency, and they would give you an approval that works at both the provincial and federal level,” McNab adds. “It would also mean you would submit your application once… and not multiple times.”
The key reason miners are eager to speed up the process is that “the capital that is required to get to that 15-year hurdle has to be exposed for 15 years,” McNab explains. He says shortening the permitting timeline can help reduce both risk and project costs.
The strategy does not provide specific details about what a streamlined permitting process would look like. Longe says that while the provinces and territories will likely reduce delays where they can, their plan would not eliminate certain parts of the existing permitting process, such as environmental assessments and consultations with Indigenous groups.
Another key takeaway from the strategy is its focus on developing the infrastructure for a full critical minerals value chain in Western and Northern Canada. Critical minerals that are extracted in Canada have typically been exported to other countries, where they are processed and used to create products that are then imported back into Canada and sold to Canadians.
The strategy indicates a desire to keep as much of the overall process in Canada as possible, which would benefit the domestic economy, McNab says. He points to China as an example of a country that has invested “the time, money, and effort to figure out” how to do just that, and argues that Canada, in contrast, has long “sat back and not done very much” on the same front.
McNab says ensuring that Canada has the capacity to process its own critical minerals is also important for security reasons.
“Typically for these critical minerals, we would dig stuff out of the ground, ship it out of the country, and a country like China or Indonesia would process it and then ship it back to us in a semi-finished form,” McNab says. “Now, they’re… just not willing to share that process and product as much as they used to be.
“From a security perspective, if I need… high-strength magnets for defence use, I don’t want to find out that the one country that’s got all the rare earths that go into magnets is not going to sell to North America because of geopolitics,” he says.
Millen argues Canada already has a strong foundation to build upon. “Canada has a really deep talent pool,” he says. “And that’s something that I’m not sure Canadians realize relative to other countries around the world.”
There’s a “tremendous number of people in Canada” who are experts in mining exploration, mine development, regulations, and financing mining projects, he says. Canada also already has much of the infrastructure needed to transport people and minerals across the country and around the world, including ports, roads, and railways.
“All of that is an opportunity for Canada to enhance critical minerals development,” he says.
Overall, McNab and Longe are optimistic about what the critical minerals strategy signals. “It's an opportunity to transform many aspects of this country that we’ve been thinking about,” McNab says. Longe notes the strategy is “really the first coordinated strategy on critical minerals, which is one of Canada’s strongest playing cards in terms of our economy and the resources that we have within the country.
“It’s just nice to see that we’re turning our attention to how we can do things more efficiently here for the benefit of our economy,” he says.
While Millen agrees the strategy has many good ideas, he argues its success will depend on how it’s ultimately implemented.
“If you go to any particular company right now and ask them, will this make a difference? They’ll say, ‘Show me what happens on my next permitting decision. Will it help me get my permit or not?’” he says. “That’s where the questions will arise: will the decision makers within the government… actually do anything as a result of this document?
“I think that remains to be seen,” Millen says.
